The focus may have shifted away from the National to the West End this year in the nominations announced yesterday for the Laurence Olivier Awards, earning a total of just seven nominations (against 20 two years ago), but it was still a striking fact that three out of four of the nominees for Best New Play were for work originated there – Helen Edmundson’s adaptation of Coram Boy, Howard Brenton’s Paul and Simon Stephens’ On the Shore of the Wide World (co-produced with Manchester’s Royal Exchange) – with the category completed by Richard Bean’s Harvest, the only play from the Royal Court that styles itself as the national theatre of new writing to make the list.
Of course, it was a playwright who died over 200 years ago, Schiller, who proved to the writer of the year on Shaftesbury Avenue, a fact triumphantly vindicated with 12 nominations – six apiece – for Don Carlos (transferred from Sheffield Crucible) and the Donmar’s Mary Stuart (that transferred to the Apollo). The Donmar also notched up an eight further nominations for its West End co-production of Guys and Dolls, meaning that it’s the theatre with the largest single number of nominations.
But the production with the largest number of nominations was Billy Elliot – named nine times – including a joint nomination for the three boys who shared the title role between them for Best Actor in a Musical. At least they won’t fight between them for the award; elsewhere, several contests have been engineered between performers in the same production, with Mary Stuart’s Janet McTeer and Harriet Walter going head-to-head for Best Actress, while from Guys and Dolls, Jenna Russell and Jane Krakowski compete for Best Actress in a Musical and their male partners Ewan McGregor and Douglas Hodge rival each other for Best Actor in a Musical.
In fact this year’s nominations are heavily concentrated around a number of core productions: as well as Billy Elliot, Guys and Dolls and the two Schillers, the Almeida’s revival of Hedda Gabler features prominently with six nominations, and the Broadway import of Death of a Salesman has three.
There are a couple of notable exclusions: Kevin Spacey’s first complete season in charge of the Old Vic is completely unrecognised, and the RSC has a sole nod for the costumes in its production of The Dog in the Manger, part of the Spanish Golden Age season that was seen at the Playhouse.
